I’ve lived a good and reasonably long life, and as this Jewish New Year begins, I’ve much to be grateful for….and for that, I am ….well…..grateful.
Mostly, I am happy to be able to experience the gratitude, the acceptance, the sour with the sweet, the hard won moments of internal peace…..when the stomach is calm, the nerves are soothed and the breathing is deep and luxurious.
I used to teach my NYU Acting students that “relaxation is the most important thing in Life”….and now I understand that what I really meant was that inner peace,
deep calm, optimistic acceptance and the ability to truly breathe deep were the vital goals…..with that sort of relaxation, anything is possible…even hitting that high note your voice is scared of. That sort of relaxation is hard to achieve at times, but it is possible , and it is life-saving, in my opinion.
Then again, it used to be that hitting all the highest notes, no matter what, was what I thought a good life was all about and, naturally, this expectation of myself…my imperfect and only human self….led to desire with a capital D: Desire to always hit the high notes. …….of course, that’s not at all the point, is it? That is simply impossible.
It’s difficult to breathe deeply at high altitudes.
So I lived most of my life in Desire when i was younger, and that was painful because Desire is deeply inflaming, difficult to quench , hard on the body ….actually most of my desires had to do with the body, in my work, in my love life…so lots of pain, lots of dashed expectations, lots of what I experienced as necessities unmet.
And all that drama?
Simply an illusion…not true…deceptive and wily ….energizing to some degree, but ultimately leading me down wrong roads that brought me much discomfort.
Now it feels like age has cooled the fires.
Another thing to be grateful for, I promise you.
Another observation: as my younger life was so filled with Desire, most of my memories of those younger years are inextricably linked to those remembered pains, those recalled struggles, those mental photographs edged in the aging brown of years passed.
The memories are mixed with the desires because that seems to be how the human being is built: we do it all, and all we do blends into everything else our organism is capable of experiencing. We marry ourselves to our experience and that is how memory is born. It’s unavoidable. It’s our Fate. It is what we are: totally sensory/psychologic/ephemeral/yet concrete beings.
And, the beauty part?
If Grace exists , we live and we learn…..God knows, I hope I have…I hope I do.